The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

Bears usually fight "on the square," openly and above-board, rarely committing foul murder. If one bear hates another, he attacks at the very first opportunity, He does not cunningly wait to catch the offender at a disadvantage and beyond the possibility of rescue. Sometimes a captive bear kills a cage-mate or mauls a keeper, but not by the sneaking methods of the human assassin who shoots in the dark and runs away. I do not count the bear as a common criminal, even though at rare intervals he kills a cage-mate smaller and weaker than himself. One killing of that kind, done by Cinnamon Jim to a small black bear that had annoyed him beyond all endurance, was inflicted as a legitimate punishment, and was so recorded. The attack of two large bears, a Syrian and a sloth bear, upon a small Japanese black bear, in which the big pair deliberately attempted to disembowel the small victim, biting him only in the abdomen, always has been a puzzle to me. I cannot fathom the idea which possessed those two ursine minds; but I have no doubt that some of the book-making men who read the minds of wild animals as if they were open books could tell me all about it. On the ice-pack in front of his stone hut at the north end of the Franz Josef Archipelago Nansen saw an occurrence that was plain murder. A large male polar bear feeding upon a dead walrus was approached across the ice-pack by two polar-bear cubs. The gorging male immediately stopped feeding and rushed toward the small intruders. They turned and fled wildly; but the villain pursued them, far out upon the ice. He overtook them, killed both, and then serenely returned to his solitary feast.